Justin had been the brave one. Justin had had the guts to go against his father. “I see that my father had many of the qualities Justin claimed. And because I emulated him, so did I.” Shame was a thousand prickly thorns piercing the underside of his skin.
You’re choosing a path here, Jonah.
Ah, yes. Justin had been right. And that path had led him there, to Windisle, to life as an outcast and a monster. But Justin . . . the brave one, the good one, had lost his life. Because of Jonah. Because of the path Jonah had chosen, the one Justin had begged him not to travel.
“Justin knew who my father was and did everything to be the polar opposite of him. He fought for justice, he took many pro bono cases, and he gave practically every cent he earned to charity. He made the world a better place.” Unlike me, hung in the air between them and somehow Jonah knew she heard the silent sound of the unspoken words too.
“There are lots of ways to avoid pain,” she murmured. “None of them are healthy if they’re based on fear. A reaction—a rebellion if you will—rather than something from the heart.”
But he didn’t want to consider what might or might not have been his brother’s faults, what his brother might have been doing solely to avoid pain instead of acting from pure sincerity. He wanted to continue to see Justin as he deserved to be seen: good and righteous. “Maybe,” he said without conviction, pushing the idea to the back of his mind.
They were both quiet for a moment before Clara said, “Tell me from the beginning, Jonah.”
The beginning. He forced his mind back to a time when he’d only heard Murray Ridgley’s name on the news, when he was the monster, not Jonah. Not yet.
He sighed shakily. “When I first started at the firm, there had been several girls found in New Orleans the year before, raped and murdered. The police were still on the hunt for the perpetrator, but had little to go on. When a girl was picked up on the side of the road, bloody, beaten, half-alive, they got their first break. Her wrists were still bound and the way she’d been tied up, the particular knot that was used, was the same one used on the murdered girls.”
“Amanda Kershaw,” Clara whispered. “She was the lone survivor.”
“Yes. She was able to help the police pinpoint the location where she’d been taken, where the man later arrested and identified as Murray Ridgley had raped her and almost taken her life before she’d managed to escape.”
Jonah’s stomach tightened in distress. To have escaped him once, only to be murdered by him later. The pain of that, the bleak, cosmic injustice in which he’d played a part, still haunted his every waking hour. It was terrible and tragic and wrong. And he could have stopped it.
“Anyway,” he said, and even he could hear the despondency in his own tone, “when Murray Ridgley contacted the firm, the partners decided to take on his case. And later, they assigned it to me.”
“Did you believe him to be innocent?” The way she said the final word, quickly and with a soft intake of air, led him to believe she was holding her breath.
He paused because something inside of him knew it was very important he be truthful, not necessarily for Clara, but for himself.
He’d described their talks as a sort of confessional and though he’d never expected to confess this to her, if he was going to, and if any small crumb of redemption was available to his blackened soul, he must first be truthful.
“I wasn’t positive—there was no concrete evidence, only a mountain of circumstantial—but I knew it was a possibility.”
Jonah heard the small whoosh of air as it flowed from Clara’s lungs. “Did you withhold evidence, Jonah?”
“No. God, no. I wanted to win, Clara, so I was focused on that. But I didn’t lie or cheat to do it.”
He thought back to the whispered words behind closed doors, the way the partners had ceased talking when he walked into a room, and he wondered again if they had been keeping something from him . . . The thought flitted through his head, but he let it go without attempting to catch it. What did it matter now anyway?
“The thing that ultimately got him acquitted was Amanda Kershaw’s testimony.”
Jonah clenched his eyes shut, letting his head fall against the stone with a heavy thud. “Yes. She . . . she wasn’t strong, Clara, and I knew that. She wasn’t like you.”
He paused, thinking back to the first time he’d met Amanda at the courthouse, the way she’d shaken when she spoke, the way her eyes had darted around, the way she’d drawn her shoulders in as if to appear smaller, as if to hide from the world. He’d seen the way she pulled at her sleeves to conceal the needle marks on her arms, and he’d used that too.
“I used her weaknesses against her when she got up on the stand.” He banged his head against the stone again, a dull thud, and he heard Clara shift. “I demolished her. They practically had to carry her away, she’d gotten so emotionally distraught. She appeared unstable and unreliable—almost insane—just as I’d planned. The partners all congratulated me later. They slapped me on the back and told me how brilliant I’d been.”
Jonah laughed, but it was a raw scraping sound, no humor infused in it at all. “Brilliant. I’d brilliantly obliterated a girl who’d been the victim of a horrific crime that most people wouldn’t have survived.”
You’re choosing a path here, Jonah.
His heart beat hollowly in his chest, the reminder that he was still here, living, breathing, and the further reminder that life held no true justice. Or maybe it did sometimes. He brought his hand to the half of his face that was ruined and ran his fingers over the ridged and melted skin covering the planes of his bones, tipping his head back as he gazed up at the stone structure that kept him separated from the world. Yes, maybe it did.
For maybe this is worse than death.
“Then what?” Clara whispered. She knew. She already knew, but she wanted to hear it from him. And he’d come this far. He just needed to go a little bit further.
“The jury acquitted Murray Ridgley.” He closed his eyes again, picturing that day. “I felt . . . I don’t know. I expected to feel happy . . . proud, but I just felt kind of . . . empty I guess. I attributed it to what I knew Justin’s reaction had probably been. I knew, to him, the news would have been very bad. But I didn’t take his calls. It was why I didn’t take his calls.”
“You felt ashamed.”
“I . . .” Had he? Had he felt ashamed for winning? Maybe. Maybe it had been teasing the edges of his conscience, though he hadn’t allowed himself to fully consider it.
Winning had been his intention, and win he had. Only, it hadn’t felt like victory.
He’d thought maybe it would be a delayed reaction. He was tired. After all, he’d been working like a dog since he’d been put on the case. “Yes, though I didn’t admit it to myself at the time. And truthfully, I might have just let it go if things hadn’t . . . taken the turn they did.”
“What about the video?”
“The video was a lie, Clara. I did plenty of disgraceful things, but that wasn’t one of them, nor did it truthfully portray the way I was feeling after Murray Ridgley got off, despite that his acquittal was largely because of me.”
The video had been part of every news story that aired about the case. It was a clip of Jonah popping the cork off a bottle of champagne as he and the partners laughed and cheered.
“A legal secretary who worked there shot it after a case we’d won many months before, a case that I hadn’t even worked on. It was in no way associated with the Murray Ridgley case, but of course, the news didn’t care about that, nor did they bother to fact-check.”
It had made him appear giddy and excited. They’d mixed it with a video of the carnage that occurred later, showing it again and again, and the story it told was awful and shameful. But it was only partly true.
Clara paused as if soaking that information in. “Tell me, Jonah. Tell me about that day.”
That day.
That day.
That day.
The words rang in his head the way the gunshots had, the way the screams still did.
That day. He’d thought he’d never ever talk about that day, but here he was. And it occurred to him that only this girl, in this way, could have made him do it. And he wondered if it was a blessing, or a curse.